At&t Sets Production Of 1 Million-bit Chips

September 06, 1985|By Christine Winter.

It appears that researchers in the semiconductor industry have been reading a few of those Dale Carnegie tracts on ``How to Improve Your Memory.`` But it looks like the books were translated into Japanese as well.

Just six months after American Telephone & Telegraph Co. announced development by Bell Laboratories of a 1-million-bit chip, AT&T said Thursday it will begin producing the chips for inspection and testing by customers.

AT&T is ``far and away`` the first U.S. company to reach such an advanced stage in development of the next generation of memory chips, said a spokesman for the Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, Calif.

But he said several Japanese firms have also begun sampling the chips. The Japanese dominate the market for lesser-memory chips.

Fujitsu Ltd., NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. are already sending out one-megabit chips for evaluation, he said. Texas Instruments Inc. and Motorola Inc. are among U.S. companies still in the development process.

Though AT&T refuses to engage in any rhetoric about a Japanese-American race to get the new chips onto the market in quantity, a spokesman agreed that being early with production is an advantage. He said the company plans to start shipping the chips in volume early next year.

``We are not at war, because we are not primarily a memory company. We are not out to dominate a market like memory chips. It is just one part of our overall semiconductor strategy,`` said Don Leidberg, director of sales and marketing for components and electronics systems groups.

Leidberg said that component revenues for AT&T were about $3 billion in 1984, including internal business within the company. AT&T plans to double that figure by 1990, with as much as 25 percent of sales to commercial customers, he said.

The new chips will offer four times the data-storage capacity of other chips on the market, and will be about one-eighth the size of a postage stamp. AT&T will use the chips in its products, such as telephone switches, private branch exchange systems, and mini and personal computers, and sell them as components.